


Cocky and Familiar

by middnighter



Series: familiar bastards [1]
Category: Justice League International (Comics)
Genre: Bad Self-Published Erotica, Blackmail, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, i don't like this term but this definitely classifies as crack
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-27 02:55:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15015131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middnighter/pseuds/middnighter
Summary: The last thing Ted Kord expected to find while searching through badly written gay slash novels was Booster Gold on the cover. Oh, this is going to befun.





	Cocky and Familiar

**Author's Note:**

> BEHOLD one of the most cursed things i have ever written. 
> 
> "tom, what the fuck?" you might ask, to which i answer: blame rose and zero.

In retrospect, Ted should have figured out about it earlier.

Booster didn’t come from the future already a superstar with a face worth putting on cereal boxes and toothpaste advertisements. He had to have started somewhere.

And given the level of ridiculousness Booster’s licensing deals got to these days —with him being a superhero and therefore easily marketable— Ted could only begin to imagine just how bad they were back when he was just a nobody and needed something, _anything_ , to give himself an edge and stand out.

But Ted was nothing if not resourceful. He _was_ going to find out what Booster did to kickstart his advertising career.

The answer came from Barbara.

She had the habit of downloading a bunch really badly written, self-published erotica novels to make fun of with Dinah, Helena and Zinda during plane rides, and she told Ted about the worst ones.

“Dude, you _have_ to read this one.”

It was late at night, and Ted was only still awake thanks to the brightness of his computer screen and Barbara’s voice in his headphones. Which was probably why he didn’t make use of his common sense to say no, why would I want to read that, why are you showing me this, I thought we were friends.

“What’s it about?” Ted said instead.

“It’s a gay mpreg werewolf shifter romance.”

Ted blinked. “A _what_.”

Barbara dissolved into laughter. “A gay mpreg werewolf shifter romance,” she repeated, articulating each word like Ted was supposed to _know_ what that meant. “Written by Wolfgang Glasscock.”

Ted pinched the bridge of his nose and snorted out a laugh. “Of course. I hope you’re not buying this stuff.”

“There’s a blog that posts a lot of epubs of this kind of books. _A lot_ of epubs. Like, you could read one book a day and not be done by next year. But you shouldn’t encourage piracy, Ted,” she said in an exaggerated lecturing voice. “Wolfgang Glasscock deserves to be paid for their hard work.”

“And people make fun of me for calling myself the Blue Beetle.”

“Here’s a link to the blog. I strongly recommend browsing it if you’re in need of a laugh one day. The covers, man, _the covers!_ They are works of art.”

“I’ll check that out,” Ted said.

And he did, a few days later. He had too many energy drinks and just couldn’t fall asleep, so once he ran out of websites to refresh he opened his bookmarks folder to do some organizing. He ended up finding the link to the blog Barbara told him about, and opened it out of sheer curiosity, and because that would surely be more entertaining than sorting his bookmarks anyway.

It didn't take long until Ted was snickering to himself, reading _promising_ titles such as ‘Muscling Through’, ‘Glitterland Aftermath’, the ‘Kinky in the City series’ (those guys wrote whole _series?_ ), or ‘Saved, the omegaverse series’ —Ted googled what omegaverse was, and then wished he hadn’t.

The covers were the cherry on top. Apart from the occasional minimalist design, most of them were really badly made edits of half naked people staring at the reader, with random stock photos or gradients in the background. Even he could do a better job, and he wasn’t even that good at photoshop.

But it was well past 3 in the morning, and Ted kept scrolling, just to see which horror he would find next.

He wouldn’t be disappointed.

Indeed, after 20 minutes of scrolling and laughing, he found a book that really caught his attention. It wasn’t the title, it was the model on the cover.

Ted would recognize those golden locks anywhere.

Was that Booster?!

Ted zoomed in and squinted.

That definitely was Booster. They had photoshopped him eyeshadow, and even more defined abs, to the point where they might as well be silicone implants given how different they looked like —not that Ted thought enough about Booster’s abs to be able to instantly picture what they looked like.

(But that were definitely photoshopped. He could _tell_.)

The book had been published years ago, around the same time as Booster’s time travel to their time, and something clicked in Ted’s head.  

So _that_ was what Booster had been up to, building his brand from the ground up.

Holy shit.

Surely this whole thing couldn’t get any better.

He opened the link to the book in a new tab and kept browsing, hoping to find another book where Booster was featured.

He scrolled through a few more until he found another one. This time, Booster in his shirtless glory was sprawled in front of a football field, sharing the cover with a wolf, a tiger, and a hot, equally half-naked freckled redhead that— _holy fuck was that Guy?_

Ted rubbed his temples.

He hated to admit it but that also made sense. Guy had to have found a way to afford his college tuition and his life in Michigan away from his parents _somehow_ , right? As far as Ted knew, being a teacher didn’t pay that much. It made sense. Somehow.

Ted almost fell off his chair laughing hysterically when he processed that Guy and Booster were photoshopped on the cover of a gay erotica novel as the starring couple, which they probably had no idea about since they didn’t even know each other back when the book got published. And given the way Booster’s hand leaned in an awkward position against Guy’s chest, it looked like they weren’t even on the same shoot but were instead edited together to stare at each other with smoldering intensity.

So they probably had no idea how out of their hands this side job of theirs went.

Once he caught his breath, Ted rolled his chair a few feet away from the computer screen and turned on the coffee machine. He was going to need a lot of caffeine in his body to find a way to use this information to its full blackmail potential.

**Author's Note:**

> i swear this is going somewhere


End file.
